Face Matching Under Time Pressure and Task Demands
Abstract
Understanding how people recognize and match faces is important in many real-world situations, including policing, military, security and retail environments. We investigate the effects of time pressure and additional task demands on face matching performance. In a 2x2 factorial design—varying whether there was high or low time pressure, and whether or not an ad- ditional task had to be completed—participants were asked to judge whether each of a series of face image pairs were of the same person. Large individual differences were observed. Recall was higher than precision, and performance worsened under high time pressure with the additional task. Learning effects within conditions were observed, and response times were generally independent of the decisions made. Some implications of these findings for applied environments are discussed.
Introduction
Face matching is the process of verfiying the equivalence of two or more people on the basis of their fa- cial characteristics. It involves visually perceiving a face, and...